


The Lighthouse Keeper

by gardnerhill



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Community: watsons_woes, F/M, Gen, Money, Prompt Fic, Victorian Attitudes, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-12
Updated: 2013-07-12
Packaged: 2017-12-19 05:55:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/880214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Freedom works both ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lighthouse Keeper

**Author's Note:**

> For JWP 2013 Prompt #11: **Ladies' Night:** Use a female POV.

When any of my friends express sympathy over my “plight,” all I can do is keep my lips close-pressed over my tea lest I burst out laughing at the idea.

I can hardly blame them. To all outside eyes I must often seem as bereft as an Army wife, waiting for her soldier to come home for another brief liberty before haring off again. There is my husband, away to his friend’s side how many days in a year, and with no word of warning in most cases – and there am I alone by the fireside once again with no doting husband, no clamouring brood, no marks of a successful match.

I would lie if I did not say that there had not been times in the early days of our marriage when I saw him receive a telegram at breakfast and sourly wished that it was from another woman, someone I could honestly hate for taking him away so many times for conventional tawdry reasons. I joked more than once that if anything, the spouse he betrayed was Mr. Holmes every time he left Baker Street to return to our Kensington home.

But a woman who marries a knight-errant cannot complain when he is away with his king on another campaign. I am the daughter of a Major, and of an Army wife; I know the life for which I was destined.

I also saw how a conventional life of work and home withered John’s spirit and cast him into melancholy moods when sleep eluded him and his old wounds would harry him more than ever – nor could I fail to see his brightened eyes and robust stride when he came home to me after another of his excursions. (A wife has more private reasons to be glad of the return of that sparkle in her husband’s eye.)

And in time, like a late-blooming rose, the joys of this life opened up to me.

Where I’d once experienced loneliness, I now reveled in my solitude, spending my days and evenings reading everything I could find and travelling beyond the market-place, visiting friends and old employers and distant relations for days on end. Once or twice I positively shocked fellow concert-goers by attending an event as solo as the featured singer – and once I accompanied my friend Mrs. Pendleton to a lecture on Egypt when last-minute business made her husband unable to use the second ticket. (Mrs. Pendleton told me over our wine and cakes afterward that it had been one of the most enjoyable evenings she’d ever experienced.)

The reason I had this freedom was because I held the purse-strings. Despite his bad habit of stealing my husband at his whim, Mr. Holmes has my eternal gratitude for two very strong reasons. The first, of course, is that he was the catalyst who brought John and me together. But the other is that it was at his urging that John entrusted to me our financial matters – all of them, not merely the household budget. (“It’s only practicality, Mrs. Watson – you have spent your life managing a woman’s meager salary to excellent effect. As the Book says, one who can handle small sums can be entrusted with large ones.”) Much of my reading material during John’s absences were newspapers and stockbrokers’ tomes – more confusing than helpful, true, and often frightening to read of crashes and sells that ruined fortunes. But I also noticed which items, like the Tortoise in the fable, plodded along dully and slowly rose, and did not dash away only to be lost; and those shares I had the broker buy for us (I became quite good at forging John’s signature). John may have suffered his own wounded pride for a while, relying on his wife for his pocketbook’s contents; but he confided that if he’d been given his rightful ownership of our means he would have speculated and gambled all of it away to a whisper of its former self – as happened occasionally with his travelling funds!

Another freedom that appeared a curse to the outside world was purely the work of Fate; we never had children. John never spoke of wanting them – like most men, he’d resolved to deal with that issue when and if it became necessary. But I had spent my working life tending other people’s children in all their moods, and had had quite enough of the little creatures for a lifetime. We never did learn which of us was to blame for our barren household, or if our flesh was simply not as convivial as our hearts and minds; it did not hurt us, so we did not consider it a problem.

A woman with her own money, unburdened by children, and helpmeet of a husband who is as happy to give her her freedom as she is to send him to his friend’s aid, behaves in ways that are different than those of conventional wives. She walks boldly, holds her head up, looks men as well as women in the eye, speaks her mind, makes decisions. Others noticed the change, for my woman friends naturally became drawn to me when they were in difficulty (“like birds to a lighthouse,” as John once wrote of me – where conventional husbands would poetically call their wives every flower-name in the book, mine makes of me a sea-building!). In me they found an ear, an open hand, an intercessionary – and once, aided by Mr. Holmes, sanctuary from a brute. “You’ll be marching for the vote next,” John laughed, and laughed harder when I only smiled at him.

Sadly, some of my woman acquaintances have reached out to me precisely because of these qualities of mine – and then dismissed me among themselves because of those qualities. My determination becomes mannishness; my financial advice marks me as a cold-hearted Scrooge with a banker’s draught where my heart should be; my level-headedness described as cold-bloodedness. I would let it rankle me more – did I not see how completely Mr. Holmes dismisses others’ regard for him (save for John’s). So those former friends continue to hiss their lies and theories behind my back (a knowledge of the stock-market causes miscarriage, I have learned), and I continue to walk boldly and look them and their husbands in the eye.

One night John and I amused each other by talking about how we’d envisioned our futures before the Sholto’s mysterious letters brought me to his door. I was not a woman of means, nor yet impoverished; I’d simply imagined living my entire life as a governess for other people’s families until age or infirmity sent me to the asylum or possibly the care of one of my former charges. He, in turn, told me that he’d never looked beyond following Mr. Holmes until the day he died.

“Well, Mr. Watson,” I laughed, setting down my ledger. “I believe you still have a chance to fulfill that destiny!”  



End file.
